Urban Context and Mass Culture: An Analysis of Shanghai's Urban Cultural Space

Author: Wang Wenying / Ye Zhongqiang (editors)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: The book "Urban Context and Mass Culture—Analysis of Shanghai Urban Cultural Space" consists of five chapters: The Formation and Reconfiguration of Shanghai's Public Spaces for Mass Culture, "Haipai Opera" and the Construction of Mass Culture, Between the Mirror and the Outside: Film and Contemporary Urban Life, "Urban Maps" and Consumerist Ideology, and Image Shanghai and Shanghai in the Age of Image Reading. The monograph examines and organizes various forms of mass culture in Shanghai over more than a century from the perspectives of public spaces, film, opera, magazines, and images. Although this examination and organization are far from being comprehensive and in-depth, we have discovered many interesting insights and formed our own perspectives. Among them, what has drawn our attention is that seemingly boundless, ever-changing, and fluctuating mass culture has its own independent developmental logic: they have their own history of development, a real presence, and a future for development. They are interconnected with political, economic, and even cultural developments in ways of mutual dependence or mutual exclusion, but they remain a certain independent existence.